Official blog of Gurcharan Das. He is the author of India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State (Penguin 2012);The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (2009),India Unbound (2000),a novel,A Fine Family (1990),a book of essays The Elephant Paradigm (2002) & an anthology of plays,Three plays (2003). He writes a regular column for the Times of India and 5 Indian language papers and occasional pieces for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Time magazine.

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Desire or dharma: Dilemma that is as old as the vedas

Over the past few weeks
we have been mesmerized by the tragic story of Tarun Tejpal. He was a moral
voice to a whole generation, looked up to for courageous and uncompromising
journalism. The evidence of sexual assault against the founder editor of Tehelka suggests that he not only failed
a young colleague but collectively all journalists, workingwomen, and his legion of admirers. Millions of words have been
written on this story but no one has explained why men in positions of power
behave badly. We need to try and understand
the nature of human desire in a patriarchic society where male narcissism is an
ever-present reality and men believe they are more attractive than they really
are.

Desire is instinctual energy deriving
from primal biological urges. The Rigveda
says, “The
cosmos emerged from the seed of kama,
‘desire’, in the mind of the One”. A primordial sexual act of incest populated
the earth, according to the Aitareya
Brahmana when Prajapati, the primeval creator, desired his daughter. She ran
away and took the form of a doe. He turned into a stag, copulated with her, and
deer were created. Then she turned
into a cow, he became a bull, and cows come into being… and so on. The gods
said, “Prajapati is doing what is not done”. A serial act of rape, sinful and
violent, was the “origin of species”—a somewhat more colourful version than Darwin’s.

Human
beings are not only governed by instinct. Desire travels from our senses to our
imagination, and often gets focused onto a specific person. Society exploited
this idea by creating the institution of marriage for the purpose of social harmony.
Hence, the Dharmashastras insist that
sex is only for procreation. But men and women found a way to communicate their
fantasies, and this gave rise to romantic love and the art of seduction. By
the Epic period when the first kingdoms were formed, kama also meant ‘pleasure’ and in fact became a trivarga, one of the three aims of life,
along with artha and dharma. The elite embraced the courtly ideal
of the nagaraka, ‘man-about-town’. Kamasutra taught us the sixty-four arts,
whereinVatsyayana instructs, “If you
are kissed, kiss back!” Patriarchy ruled, however, and Draupadi’s disrobing in the
Mahabharata is the most celebrated display
of male power, and it led to a ghastly war.

Sexual
desire did not sit well with the ascetic, however. In the earlier Upanishadic
period, our society’s idea of the good life was challenged by the “renouncer”.
Rishis like Agastya suffered sexual anxiety over losing hard earned spiritual
energy through tapas, which is reflected
in the many myths of tempting apsaras
who bring about the involuntary ejaculation of semen. The renouncer countered
by speaking adeptly of the loathsome nature of a woman’s body. The object of
desire becomes an object of revulsion in the Buddhacharita, for example, which demonizes
the feminine ‘other’. The tension between the householder’s act of desire and
the ascetic’s conquest of desire reflects the dual nature of human beings—the
erotic and the ascetic in all of us—but it did not disturb the unhappy male
domination of society.

To
try and understand Tarun Tejpal’s actions in the historical context of male
power in society is not to excuse his wrongdoing. In a patriarchal society men
want to control the reproductive body of women. The man’s viewpoint pervades the
Vedas, the epics, and Sanskrit love poetry.
But all our texts also warn against the dangerous nature of human desire
and remind us of boundaries. Even
Vatsayana cautions in the Kamasutra
that kama must be governed by dharma.

Sexual
assault is a crime and it has less to do with sex than with power and male domination.
All societies have been patriarchal and it is a tribute to the global women’s
movement that the world has begun to change its old paradigm. Governments
around the world are instituting legal changes. In India,the
new anti-rape law and the Vishakha guidelines on sexual harassment at the
workplace are part of this global trend. They must be quickly implemented and
we must keep trying to make relations between men and
women more equal and less hierarchical.
The prize too is a big one—a safer and more civilized India.

21 comments:

Gurchan das really Very Salute To You and i also read daily Your Blog requesting You to plz visit http://cf6.co/2lIX Its Surprise from My side to you.Hope You will read and rply to me thats very grateful to me.

i agree. What was more shameful was the shameless audacity with which he and his staff went about defending or trying to feign innocence. whats even more worrying is the fact that all events and incidents have to wait to become disasters for the nation to sit up and take notice. why did the young lady keep quiet for the first few days and I am sure many more would have meekly submitted to his desires.

Great insight into the behavior of powerful men. Seems as though this demonstrated in other countries also, U.S., Italy, U.K., and so many others where women are less dominated by men in society. I was a Tejpal fan and read Tehelka. I am devastated and wonder how both he and the magazine can survive.

I came here hoping to find an opinion or a view about the current political state of affairs that I could consider when I vote at the national elections. I'm looking forward to reading what you might have to say.

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About Me

Gurcharan Das has recently published a new book, India Grows at Night: A liberal case for a strong state (Penguin 2012). He is also general editor for a 15 volume series, The Story of Indian Business (Penguin) of which three volumes have already appeared.
He is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the subtle art of dharma (Penguin 2009) which interrogates the epic, Mahabharata, in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’ His international bestseller, India Unbound, is a narrative account of India from Independence to the global information age, and has been published in 17 languages and filmed by BBC. He writes regular column for several news papers and periodic guest columns for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek. Gurcharan Das graduated with honors from Harvard University in Philosophy, Politics and Sanskrit. He later attended Harvard Business School. He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and later Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning). In 1995, he took early retirement to become a full time writer.
Visit http://gurcharandas.org for his complete work and profile.